As the Jewish national movement, Zionism aspired to speak for Jews worldwide. It aimed to gather Jews from every corner of earth to establish a national home for the Jews. The dominant wing of Zionism, fashioned after similar contemporary European movements, and admittedly sought to establish a European outpost in the levant that will secure the Jewish future and allow them to become fully European. After the Holocaust the need for a Jewish homeland became more urgent and indeed a mass immigration started to Mandatory Palestine and then after May 1948, to Israel. About a million Jews from the Arab world came to Israel under different circumstances, however the Jews of Iran overwhelmingly chose to stay in their country, despite the fact that the Zionist movement could operate openly in Iran and Zionism increasingly became growing component of the Iranian-Jewish identity complex. This talk will analyze the role and place of Zionism in the Iranian-Jewish society, political activism, and ideologies.

Lior Sternfeld is a social historian of the modern Middle East with particular interests in Jewish (and other minorities’) histories of the region. He is currently completing his first book manuscript tentatively titled: “Integrated After All: Iranian Jews in the Twentieth Century,” which examines the integration of the Jewish communities in Iran into the nation-building projects of the twentieth century. This book examines the development of the Iranian Jewish communities vis-à-vis ideologies and institutions such as Iranian nationalism, Zionism, and constitutionalism, among others. Dr. Sternfeld’s current research project examines the origins of “third-worldism” in the Middle East. His teaching interests include histories of modern Iranian and the Middle East, Jewish histories of the Middle East, and social movements in the Middle East and beyond.

During this annual event, volunteers take turns reading over a 24-hour period. This year's event, The Political Imagination, focuses on literature surrounding various political themes, by authors from around the world. Each title will be available in English and the original language in which it was published.

If you are interested in reading in Spanish, French, Japanese, German, Chinese, Portuguese or Russian, email marathonread@psu.edu.

China in the 17th century, England in the 18th century, and the United States in the 19th century each saw the publication of story collections about swindles. Some, like Zhang Yingyu’s Book of Swindles and P.T. Barnum’s The Humbugs of the World, related ostensibly true stories; others, like Richard King’s The New Cheats of London Exposed, presented stock scenarios. Such cautionary tales had great entertainment value, and they also appear in some of the most influential novels of the age. What do they share in common as a genre?

Christopher Rea is Associate Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is author of The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China (California, 2015); editor of three books including, with Nicolai Volland, of The Business of Culture (UBC Press, 2015). He is currently co-translating a Ming dynasty story collection called The Book of Swindles.

My presentation will seek to describe the transition between the Zheng family’s domination of East Asia’s maritime trading network before 1684, and the period of the “open ocean” for Chinese merchants that began that year. The Zheng family’s dominant position in the trading network from the 1650s until the early 1670s was based on their control of a regular exchange of Chinese silk for Japanese and American silver. The advent of the Sanfan Rebellion, a massive civil war within the Qing empire between 1673 and 1681, dramatically reduced the Zheng family’s access to Chinese silk and forced them to begin trading more heavily with Southeast Asia. When the last Zheng patriarch surrendered his family’s stronghold in 1683, a new period of trade was ushered in almost immediately by the Qing court’s legalization of overseas trade. My presentation will offer a new explanation for this dramatic moment in the history of maritime East Asia by contrasting the Zheng family’s carefully rebalanced system with the period of frantic legal trade that prompted the sudden re-emergence of China as the economic force in East Asia’s seas during the last decades of the seventeenth century.

I am a fifth-year PhD candidate in the departments of History and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. I am currently working on a dissertation that seeks to remap the evolution of East Asia’s trading network by looking at economic, political, and technological factors affecting it. To this end I have collected data from archives held in Taiwan, China, England, Belgium, and the United States. Some of the data that I have found has also been used to publish articles on the early Qing governance of Taiwan and piracy in the Indian Ocean as well.

Not sure if the federal government is for you? This session will discuss the benefits and opportunities of federal employment as well as provide some insights into such aspects like what the General Schedule (GS) is and how to navigate the security clearance process. Emily McConnell, a member of the Partnership for Public Service's Education and Outreach Team, will share information on the state of the federal workforce and hiring trends, and you will also hear about differing programs to consider in your job search.

Emily is a Penn State Liberal Arts alumna who earned degrees in Economics and International Politics. She gained internship experience with USAID and New Leaf Initiative, before joining the Partnership for Public Service, where she has served in various positions including Development Fellow, Program Associate, and Associate Manager, before taking on her current role as a Program Manager. In her role, she develops custom engagements and offerings to help federal agencies recruit and hire the talent needed to fulfill their missions, with a focus on internships and entry-level talent.

While you may find yourself summarizing your work history into a one-page document for a typical job application, your federal resume should be more detailed and run two-to-five pages in length for an entry-level job. How do you know about all of the nuances to consider while crafting your federal resume? Emily McConnell, a member of the Partnership for Public Service's Education and Outreach Team, will walk you through the various components as well as tips and tricks to help you succeed in landing your dream internship or job.

Emily is a Penn State Liberal Arts alumna who earned degrees in Economics and International Politics. She gained internship experience with USAID and New Leaf Initiative, before joining the Partnership for Public Service, where she has served in various positions including Development Fellow, Program Associate, and Associate Manager, before taking on her current role as a Program Manager. In her role, she develops custom engagements and offerings to help federal agencies recruit and hire the talent needed to fulfill their missions, with a focus on internships and entry-level talent.

Creating a stellar resume is only half the battle when it comes to applying for a federal job, and understanding USAJOBS, the federal governmentês primary portal for posting open jobs as well as accepting applications, is a critical step in finding that dream opportunity. Emily McConnell, a member of the Partnership for Public Service's Education and Outreach Team, will teach you how to utilize the website, review and understand job postings, and navigate the federal application process.

Emily is a Penn State Liberal Arts alumna who earned degrees in Economics and International Politics. She gained internship experience with USAID and New Leaf Initiative, before joining the Partnership for Public Service, where she has served in various positions including Development Fellow, Program Associate, and Associate Manager, before taking on her current role as a Program Manager. In her role, she develops custom engagements and offerings to help federal agencies recruit and hire the talent needed to fulfill their missions, with a focus on internships and entry-level talent.

Free and open to the public panel discussion with: Akosua Adomako Ampofo, Professor at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana (Legon); Mary Hames, Director of the Gender Equity Unit, University of the Western Cape; and Margo Okazawa-Rey, Faculty at the School of Leadership Studies at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, CA and Elihu Root Peach Fund Chair in Women's Studies at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY.

Climate change is not just a matter of CO2 in the atmosphere, of melting glaciers, flooded coastal plains, and rising global temperatures. It is all that, and much more– but it is also a matter of justice. There are people involved: how can we grapple with the fact that the people least responsible for carbon emissions are often the most vulnerable to their most catastrophic effects? There is an ecosphere at stake: how can we understand the obligations of humans to the planet and all its bioforms? Perhaps questions too difficult or elusive for public policy must be addressed instead by art. On September 24, at the State Theatre, we’ll try to do just that.

As geographical borders diminish in importance and markets globalize, English is rapidly becoming a preferred language of discourse. In this talk, I present collaborative work (resulting from international collaboration with Mirjam Ernestus at Radboud University and funding by the National Science Foundation to the Center for Language Science) that explores those situations where both interlocutors are non-native speakers using English as a lingua franca. In order to investigate the flexibility of phonological categories in bilingual language production, recordings of Spanish-English bilinguals in Spain speaking with two Dutch-English bilingual confederates across two speech styles (the Nijmegen Corpus of Spanish English) were used to track the production patterns of two key vowel contrasts in English. The first, the difference between bit and beet, is not present in Spanish but is present in Dutch; the second, the difference between bat and bet, is not present in Dutch but is distinguished by Spanish speakers of English. Results of statistical analysis reveal that the Spaniards align their production patterns not to more native-like English (which would require a four-way contrast), but rather to the production patterns of their Dutch interlocutors. This is also a function of speech style and proficiency: Spaniards make the beet/bit distinction gradually over time in informal, but not formal speech, and more proficient speakers align more strongly than less proficient speakers to the merged bat/bet production of the Dutch speakers. These findings are interpreted in a framework where alignment to the patterns of one's interlocutor is a complex relationship among language-internal and language-external factors.

Grant Berry is a 2016-2017 Center for Global Studies Fellow. He is also a Ph.D. candidate in Spanish and Language Science in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese and an active member of the Center for Language Science. While he maintains varied interests in phonetics, phonology, and bilingualism, the nexus of his research is language variation and change. Grant's research examines sociodemographic and cognitive behavioral factors that link an individual to his/her community on the level of his/her linguistic production, especially in situations where language is undergoing change or is highly stratified along socioeconomic and/or ethnic lines. More information can be found atgrantberry.info.

The dispute between China and the Philippines over the South China Sea has garnered widespread attention in the global community after China rejected the ruling by the arbitral tribunal. This event will examine the various implications of the South China Sea ruling and, in turn, discuss important theories of international law and international relations. We have invited scholars and practitioners from different countries to attend this seminar and share different perspectives on the South China Sea dispute. The seminar will be recorded and the presentations will be published as a book in China.

Seminar Program

9:00 a.m.

Opening Remarks

9:05-9:55 a.m.

Panel 1: "The Role and Reach of International Arbitration in Disputes between Sovereign States"Moderator: Catherine A. ROGERS Panelists: Thomas E. CARBONNEAU, Liang ZHANG, and Oluwasen AJAYI

Panel 3: "The Principal Legal Issues in the Disputes between China and Philippines over the South China Sea"Moderator: James W. HOUCK Panelists: He JIANG, Ekrem KORKUT, and Qiongqiong TANG

11:45 a.m.

Closing Remarks

11:50 a.m.

Lunch

Seminar Presented by: The Penn State Research and Career Development Network for Law & International Affairs; The Center for Global Studies; The Penn State International Arbitration Group; and The Foundation for Law and International Affairs.

After the fiasco of the Iraq War of 2003, the West pushed for a new mandate through the UN called the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in 2005. This new mandate revived ideas of humanitarian intervention that had been called into question from the detritus of Iraq. No lessons were learned. After R2P came Libya, a society now in ruins, and then came Syria, a country whose civil war had been fanned along even as no good outcome seemed on the horizon. This talk will explore the landscape of intervention and its perils.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. He is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian Studies and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College. He writes regular columns and reports for Frontline (India), The Hindu (India), Alternet (USA) and BirGün (Turkey). He is the author of twenty books, including most recently - The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016) and Land of Blue Helmets: The United Nations in the Arab World (co-edited with Karim Makdisi). His previous books include The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (2007) and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (2013). He is the Chief Editor of LeftWord Books (New Delhi, India).

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of Asian Studies, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Weiss Chair of the Humanities, the Department of History, the School of International Affairs, and the Rock Ethics Institute.

Please come join us for a talk and reading by Ricardo Lísias, one of Brazil's most prominent fiction writers. Lísias (b. 1974) holds a doctorate in literary studies from the Universidade de Campinas (UNICAMP). In 2010 he was awarded the Prêmio São Paulo de Literatura for his novel O livro dos mandarins, and in 2012 his short story "Tólia" was included in Granta's collection of the top twenty Brazilian writers under the age of forty.

This talk will be in English. For selections of the author's work, check out the following links to two of his stories in English translation:

This talk is presented by the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese and co-funded by the Latin American Studies Program, the Center for Global Studies, and the Department of Comparative Literature. For more information, please contact Krista Brune (kub290@psu.edu) or Sarah J. Townsend (sjt18@psu.edu).

Theodore Hughes is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Korean Studies in the Humanities and Director of the Center for Korean Research at Columbia University. He is the author of Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier (Columbia University Press, 2012), which was awarded the Association for Asian Studies James B. Palais Book Prize. He is the co-editor of Intermedial Aesthetics: Korean Literature, Film, and Art (special issue of the Journal of Korean Studies, 2015); the co-editor of Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013); and the translator of Panmunjom and Other Stories by Lee Ho-Chul (Norwalk: EastBridge, 2005).

Mr. Urbina has been an investigative reporter with the New York Times since 2003. He became a senior investigator reporter for the National Desk in 2010, where he wrote a series in 2011, Drilling Down, about the oil and gas industry and fracking. His investigations most often focus on worker safety and the environment. He has received a Pulitzer, a Polk and various other journalism awards. Several of his stories have been made into feature films. His most recent and on-going series, “The Outlaw Ocean,” explores lawlessness on the high seas. He holds degrees in history for Georgetown and the University of Chicago.

Firoozeh Dumas, Author of Funny in FarsiLight breakfast followed by a reading, Q&A and book signing. Books will be available for purchase on site from Barnes and Noble. The event is free and open to the public.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Global Studies, the Penn State Outreach & Online Education Diversity Council, The Office of Finance & Business, The University Office of Global Programs, The Office of Educational Equity/CORED, the PSU Iranian Students' Association, and Schlow Centre Region Library.

Dr. Clive Lipchin, Director of the Center for Transboundary Water Management (Israel/Jordan/Palestine)

Learn how Israel's Arava Institute's head of transboundary water management, Clive Lipchin, deals with 3 warring nations unified in their care for their water resources. Understand the unique collaboration and diplomacy that has garnered The Arava Institute seven nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. Review Arava team techniques and approaches they've leveraged to maintain a steady supply of nourishing water across boundary lines to the people who need it. This presentation will be followed by discussion and questions.

Dr. Clive Lipchin was born in South Africa and raised in Johannesburg. Clive received his first degree in applied psychology and zoology with an emphasis on wildlife management on private game farms in South Africa’s Northern Province. Clive immigrated to Israel in 1991 and received a master’s degree in desert ecology from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. In 1996, he left Israel to pursue a PhD in resource ecology management at the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. The focus of Clive’s PhD was public perceptions and attitudes towards water scarcity in Israel.

Clive joined the faculty of the Arava Institute in 2003 where he teaches a multidisciplinary course on water management in the Middle East. Clive oversees research projects, workshops and conferences that focus on transboundary water and environmental problems facing Israel, Jordan and Palestine. His specialty is in water resources management and policy. Currently, Clive is coordinating the TransBasin—Transboundary Water Basin Management Project, a project funded by the International Research Staff Exchange Scheme of the European Union. This project brings together researchers from Europe and the Middle East to study conflict and cooperation in river basin management and to identify the principles and mechanisms that both promote and hinder cooperation in river basins in Europe and the Middle East. Clive is also coordinating a USAID funded project on mitigating transboundary wastewater conflicts between Israel and Palestine and is conducting research on solar powered desalination of brackish groundwater in the Gaza Strip.

Clive has published and presented widely on the topic of transboundary water management in the Middle East and has served as senior editor on two books: “Integrated Water Resources Management in the Middle East”, and “The Jordan River and Dead Sea Basin: Cooperation amid Conflict”. Since the online publication on Oct 9th , 2009 of “The Jordan River and Dead Sea Basin: Cooperation Amid Conflict” there has been a total of 2,440 chapter downloads of the book making it one of the top 50% most downloaded eBooks in the Springer eBook Collection of 2012.

State College Borough Building, Room 201, South Allen Street, State College, PA 16801

A diplomacy and sustainability master class with Dr. Clive Lipchin, Director of the Center for Transboundary Water Management, The Arava Institute, Israel

Water is essential to human, economic and environmental health. We must work together if we are to ensure that the Spring Creek Watershed continues to meet the needs of a growing population.

Join a group of Penn State faculty, staff and students, MS4 engineers, public works directors, developers, and environmental groups to productively grapple with one of State College’s most debated topics: how to foster a thriving, regenerative economy that enhances rather than diminishes our ecological assets. Collaboratively build solutions for our watershed leveraging the insight and facilitation of one of the world leaders in this area – Dr. Clive Lipchin.

Active participants will be limited to the first 25 to register but the room can hold 50 more observers. All active participants will receive a free copy of the University of Arkansas’s Community Design Center LID Handbook.

Borrowing from some basic concepts of music theory and mathematics, I’m proposing an information model that predict the critical times for the information exchange of and synchronize the information message swap between two military organizations acting in disaster relief operations. The findings of this research will be able to support the creation of computerized agents to support real time information exchange between agents with different organizational rhythms.

I am an ABD PhD Student at Penn State University and have been working in the area of the Information Technology since 1990. I have two bachelor’s degrees and a M.Sc degree. All my studies have been in the Computer Science and or IT area. However, in order to successfully conduct software and research projects I felt the need for interdisciplinary studies that extend questions to other areas. In addition, I hold the rank of Commander in the Brazilian Navy. I was born and raised in a developing country, where I had to work very hard to achieve a better education and a high rank in the navy. I am the first women in the Brazilian Navy to have her IT doctoral degree funded abroad.

Security Council paralysis on the Ukraine and Syria; an increase in violent extremism and cyber attacks; ebola, zika and other infectious diseases; unprecedented flows of refugees and migrants; continuing allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers. As the race for election of the next Secretary-General heats up, the UN faces a crisis of relevance and a crisis of legitimacy. Professor Ian Johnstone - who has worked with two previous Secretaries-General - will examine these crises and present a set of priorities for Ban Ki Moon’s successor.

Ian Johnstone is Professor of International Law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where he has been a faculty member since the year 2000. From 2013 to 2015, he was also the Academic Dean. Prior to joining Fletcher in the year 2000, he served in the United Nations’ Executive Office of the Secretary-General. His most recent books include The Oxford Handbook on International Organizations (co-editor, forthcoming 2016); Law and Practice of the United Nations, 2nd edition (co-author, 2016); and The Power of Deliberation: International Law, Politics and Organizations (2011). Selected articles and book chapters include “The UN Security Council and International Law” in Einsiedel, Malone and Ugarte eds, The United Nations Security Council in the 21st Century (2016);“When the Security Council is Divided: Imprecise Authorizations, Implied Mandates and the Unreasonable Veto” in Weller ed, Oxford Handbook of the Use of Force (2015); “Law-making by International Organizations: Perspectives from International Law/International Relations Theory”, in Dunoff and Pollack eds Interdisciplinary Perspectives on International Law and International Relations: The State of the Art (2013); and “Legislation and adjudication in the UN Security Council: bringing down the deliberative deficit,” American Journal of International Law (2008). From 2005-2007, he was the lead author and founding editor of the Annual Review of Global Peace Operations. He is currently on the editorial boards of Global Governance journal and International Organizations Law Review. Johnstone, recipient of the James L. Paddock Teaching Award in 2005, teaches courses in international organizations and peace operations. He continues to serve as a regular consultant to the United Nations, and is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Center on International Cooperation, New York University. A citizen of Canada, he holds an LL.M degree from Columbia University and JD and B.A. degrees from the University of Toronto.

Le Destin is set in the 12th century Arab-ruled province of Andalusia. Famed philosopher Averroes is appointed grand judge by the caliph however, his liberal court judgments are not liked by everyone. This screening is part of the CGS Arabic Film Series.

Katharina N. Piechocki is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She holds a PhD. in Comparative Literature from New York University (2013) for a thesis on “Cartographic Humanism” and a doctorate in Romance Languages from Vienna University (2009) on the origin of the opera libretto. In 2015-16, Katharina was a Distinguished Junior External Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, where she was completing her first book manuscript, “Cartographic Humanism: Defining Early Modern Europe, 1480-1580.” In spring 2017, she will be a scholar in residence at the IFK (Internationales Forschungsinstitut für Kulturwissenschaften) in Vienna, Austria. At Harvard, Katharina is the co-chair (together with Tom Conley) of the Cartography Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center.

Since the 2012 terrorist attack on two U.S. government sites in Benghazi, Libya, that resulted in the death of a U.S. ambassador and several other American citizens, the name “Benghazi” has taken on a life of its own in the American lexicon. But what really happened that day in Benghazi, what does it mean for U.S. foreign diplomats, and what were the results of the subsequent investigations into the attack?

Join School of International Affairs professors Dennis Jett and Joseph DeThomas—both of whom formerly severed as U.S. diplomats in locations around the world—will discuss the Benghazi attack and the investigations conducted in its aftermath, as well as the role of U.S. ambassadors in potentially dangerous foreign countries. The discussion will be moderated by Penn State Law professor Samuel C Thompson Jr.

DeThomas—who served as the U.S. ambassador to Estonia in addition to completing tours in Austria, Ethiopia, Germany, Iran, and Mexico over 29 years as a member of the U.S. Foreign Service—will discuss the findings of the State Department’s Accountability Review Board investigation into the Benghazi attacks.

Jett, whose time in the U.S. Foreign Service spanned 28 years and three continents—including stints as the U.S. ambassador to Mozambique and Peru—will next discuss the various congressional committee investigations and reports on the Benghazi attacks. Both former ambassadors will also speak to their time in the foreign service, the role of ambassadors in countries such as Libya, and how the danger of such attacks figure into the lives of foreign service officers.

The classical music of Edo period Japan was fostered by a long period of relative peace and prosperity which enabled the emergence of a rich musical tradition involving the instruments koto, shamisen and shakuhachi together with the jiuta singing voice. This complex crisscrossing of melodic layers, coupled with the thematic sung poem, yields an extraordinarily beautiful listening experience. Sankyoku is often composed around themes of love, loss, nature and the evanescence of life. Yoko Hiraoka presents this world-class Sankyoku ensemble in collaboration with Ralph Samuelson, one of the finest shakuhachi players in the world, in a concert to engage and delight audiences of all kinds.

The concert comprises musical performances interspersed with illustrated lecture components, talking about the origin of the music and its relationships to Japanese literature and culture.

Performers

Ralph Samuelson is a performer and teacher of the Japanese bamboo flute (shakuhachi) and is one of the first of a small group of non-Japanese to be recognized as professional players in Japan. He has trained for more than 30 years in the classical style of the Kinko School of Shakuhachi under the tutelage of Living National Treasure virtuoso Goro Yamaguchi and other prominent teachers in Japan. He is active as a performer, teacher, and recording artist in the US, Japan, and elsewhere in the world. In addition, he works closely with foundations and nonprofit organizations in developing programs of international cultural exchange. He has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Julliard School, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, the Asia Society, and a host of museums, universities, and colleges in North America and East Asia. For more information on his performance practice, visit http://www.komuso.com/people/people.pl?person=59

Yoko Hiraoka is a Certified Master of three traditional Japanese string instruments — the Chikuzen biwa, the koto, and the samisen – as well as being a Certified Master of the Omote school of tea ceremony. She has been teaching these art forms for the past 25 years and is a member of the Shikandaza ensemble and the Kyoto Hogaku group, as well as an Associate Member of the Somei Music School. She has toured widely in Japan and North America, with performances at Expo ’90, the Kyoto International Music Festival, the Tozan Shakuhachi Annual Concert, the Sasayama Cultural Festival, the Kyoto Municipal Concert of Traditional Music, and an array of universities and colleges. More information on her performance practice can be found at: http://japanesestrings.com/.

Snehal A. Shingavi, Associate Professor of English, University of Texas

Snehal Shingavi is associate professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin, and the author of The Mahatma Misunderstood: the politics and forms of literary nationalism in India (Anthem Books, 2013). He has also translated Munshi Premchand’s Hindi novel, Sevasadan (Oxford, 2005), the Urdu short-story collection, Angaaray (Penguin, 2014), and Bhisham Sahni’s autobiography, Today’s Pasts (Penguin, 2015). He has a forthcoming translation of Agyeya’s novel, Shekhar: A Life, 2 vols. (Penguin, 2017).

Communicating across cultures is challenging as each culture has set rules that its members take for granted. Few of us are aware of our own cultural biases because cultural imprinting starts at a very early age. "Don't be Tired" centers around this very issue and asks if it is even possible to communicate without being close to each other in terms of language and culture and, if it is, to what extent can this link people together?

The film screening will be followed by a question and answer session with the film's director Afshin Hashemi. The event is free and open to all.

This event is sponsored by the Iranian Student Association at Penn State, The Center for Global Studies, and The Department of Film-Video and Media Studies at Penn State.

Jennifer M. Wilks is an Associate Professor in English and in African and African Diaspora Studies; she is also an affiliate of the Program in Comparative Literature. She is the author of Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism: Suzanne Lacascade, Marita Bonner, Suzanne Césaire, Dorothy West (Louisiana State UP, 2008), which explores the gendered constructs and legacies of the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude movements. Her essays have appeared in African-American Review, Callaloo, Modern Fiction Studies, and, most recently, in the edited collection Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem (U of Minnesota P, 2013). Her translation (French to English) of the 19th-century French and Swiss diaries of African American activist Mary Church Terrell was recently published, and she is currently at work on two book projects: a history of transpositions of the Carmen story set in African diasporic contexts and a study of representations of race and apocalypse in contemporary literature and culture. She spent spring 2013 as a visiting professor in the Département du Monde Anglophone at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 and in 2013-2014 served as co-director of the Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies (TILTS), whose theme was “Reading Race in Literature and Film.”

Poetry without Borders is an annual, university-wide, student-run poetry reading forum where students and faculty expose the audience to different languages and cultures. The event aims to bring together people with different backgrounds and passions. In the past, we had contributions from languages such as German, Chinese, Mongolian, Kazakhs, Norwegian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Turkish, Hebrew, Dutch, Russian, Ukrainian, and Portuguese, and students and faculty from different majors and research fields.

Poetry Without Borders not only fosters a continued appreciation for literature that binds together all cultures, but also encourages student leadership. Come out on November 8, 2016, and support coordinators, volunteers, presenters, and audience members to continue their involvement with literature and commitment to diversity at Penn State.

Kim Barker was the South Asia bureau chief for The Chicago Tribune from 2004 to 2009, directing coverage of Pakistan and Afghanistan. She wrote a darkly comic book about her time there, The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan, released in 2011 and adapted this year into the movie Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, starring Tina Fey. Barker, now an investigative reporter at The New York Times, will discuss her experiences in South Asia and Hollywood, and what lessons can be learned from both.

Reception and book signing will follow immediately after the lecture. Books will be available to purchase on site.

Sarah Thomas is an Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at Brown University. She works on contemporary film and literature from Spain, as well as Latin American cinema. Her research is especially concerned with cultural production emerging from (post)-dictatorship societies in the Spanish-speaking world. She has published on Spanish, Argentine, and Peruvian cinema is currently completing a book manuscript on the representation of childhood in Spanish film from the period 1970-1983.

Professor Peng is Qiu Shi Distinguished Professor of Chinese philosophy, intellectual history, and religions at Zhejiang University, China. He is currently based in Washington, D.C., serving as the 2016 Kluge Chair in the Library of Congress. He was formerly Professor of Chinese Philosophy at Peking University and Tsinghua University, and has held many visiting appointments and fellowships in Europe, U.S., and Asia. An authority on Confucian ethics and early modern Chinese intellectual history, he is the author of seven books and numerous articles.

This talk will discuss the ways that the celebrated, quintessential practices of the Nuyoricans (New York Puerto Ricans) as groundbreaking and experimental writers claiming new space for Latin@ identity also demystified and re-routed the underlying pedagogical directives underlying in global human rights narratives of the late 60s and 70s as they were present in legal, popular media, and historical registers. “Pedagogy” is the combination of theory and practice (or “praxis”) that forms the structure of learning for personal and societal development. Traditionally, pedagogy is understood to be generated by a hegemonic “teacher” figure. However, if we look at the approaches Nuyorican writers took to representing the figure of the student in their literary work through the critical pedagogy of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, we can identify how it is through the figure of the student that Nuyorican writers revealed and re-directed the “humanizing” pedagogical rhetoric of late 60s and 70s. Taking up this analysis not only recognizes the contributions of the Nuyoricans to the world-wide social movements of this era, but encourages us to consider how Latino/a literary perspectives and practices provide pathways to broader frameworks of analysis for scholars concerned with the development of human rights.

Molly Dooley Appel is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature with a minor in Latin American Studies. Molly was a 2007 Teach For America (TFA) corps member in New York City, teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) in Washington Heights and in the Bronx for 4 years. At Penn State she has been a teaching assistant in Comparative Literature, a research assistant and dissertation fellow for The Center for Global Studies, an instructor of Rhetoric and Composition, and an officer for the Penn State Americanists and the organization for Graduates in International Languages and Literatures. She is currently the Forrest S. Crawford Fellow in Ethical Inquiry with the Rock Ethics Institute.

Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice David N. Wecht will visit Penn State Law on Thursday, Nov. 17, where he will speak to students, faculty, and members of the Penn State and State College communities at 5:45 p.m. in the Lewis Katz’s Building’s Sutliff Auditorium. Wecht’s address—titled "Justice Louis Brandeis: Thoughts on the Centennial of the Great Jurist's Appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States”—will discuss the career and legacy of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who was first appointed to the bench in 1916 by Woodrow Wilson.

Justice Wecht, drawing on his own legal experience and scholarship, will discuss the impact and enduring influence of Brandeis’ 1916 appointment to the bench, his role in pioneering the concept of a right to privacy, his dedication to social justice, his highly-regarded defenses of the freedom of speech, and how Brandeis’ opinions continue to shape the law today.

This event is free and open to the public, as is cosponsored by the Penn State Law Review, the Moot Court Board, the Journal of Law and International Affairs, and the Yearbook on Arbitration and Mediation.

About the speaker: Justice Wecht was elected to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in November 2015 for a ten-year term that began this January. Prior to his election to Pennsylvania’s highest court, he served on the Superior Court of Pennsylvania from 2012 to 2016 and the Court of Common Pleas for Allegheny County from 2003 to 2012. A graduate of Yale University, he has also clerked for the Honorable George E. MacKinnon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, worked as an associate and partner for law firms in Pittsburgh and Washington D.C., and served as the Register of Wills and Clerk of Orphans’ Court for Allegheny County.

Wecht also serves as an adjunct professor for the Duquesne University School of Law and the Graduate School of Public & International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a member of the American, Pennsylvania, and Allegheny County Bar Associations, has received multiple awards for his commitment to the law, and is the author of numerous pieces of legal scholarship.

"After Coal" profiles inspiring individuals who are building a new future in the coalfields of eastern Kentucky and South Wales. This hour long documentary invites viewers to the front lines of the transition away from fossil fuels. Coalfield residents who must abandon traditional livelihoods share stories from the front lines of the transition away from fossil fuels.

FLAS Fellowships are awarded annually. The CGS will be awarding fellowships for Summer 2017 and for the Academic Year 2017-18. Fellowships consist of an institutional payment and a subsistence allowance. All FLAS awards are contingent upon the university receiving annual fellowship funding from the U.S. Department of Education.

Students in all fields of study are welcome to apply. Languages eligible for Penn State's FLAS Fellowships are Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Russian.

There will be two information sessions prior to the application deadline for students interested in applying for a FLAS award. If you have questions about eligibility or program requirements, or the application, you are encouraged to attend the informational session. For those unable to attend this session, there will be an additional one offered on December 6, 2016 in 463 Burrowes, 4:30-5:30 p.m.

Stephanie Foote is the Jackson and Nichols Professor of English at West Virginia University. She is author of Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature(2001), The Parvenu’s Plot: Gender, Culture, and Class in the Age of Realism (2014), the editor, with Elizabeth Mazzolini, of Histories of the Dustheap: Waste, Material Cultures, Social Justice (2012), and the editor of reprints of two of Ann Aldrich’s 1950s lesbian pulp classics We Walk Alone and We, Too, Must Love (2006). With Stephanie LeMenager, she is the founder and editor of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities. Her articles have appeared in numerous edited collections and in such journals as American Literature, American Literary History, Signs, The Henry James Review, College Literature, Pedagogy, J19, and PMLA. She is currently working on The Art of Waste, a project about garbage and literature.

FLAS Fellowships are awarded annually. The CGS will be awarding fellowships for Summer 2017 and for the Academic Year 2017-18. Fellowships consist of an institutional payment and a subsistence allowance. All FLAS awards are contingent upon the university receiving annual fellowship funding from the U.S. Department of Education.

Students in all fields of study are welcome to apply. Languages eligible for Penn State's FLAS Fellowships are Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Russian.

There will be two information sessions prior to the application deadline for students interested in applying for a FLAS award. If you have questions about eligibility or program requirements, or the application, you are encouraged to attend the informational session.

Experience stories, songs and art in different languages. Fun for speakers of all languages, including English. World Stories Alive! is a collaborative project brought to you by Schlow Centre Region Library, The Center for Global Studies at Penn State, Bilingualism Matters at Penn State, and Global Connections.

Leif Trana, Minister Counsellor for Economic Affairs at the Embassy of Norway will present "Managing the Global Commons: Norway's Interests in the Arctic" as part of the Penn State School of International Affairs’ spring colloquium. The Arctic is Norway’s top policy issue.

Before joining the Embassy of Norway in August 2014, Trana serviced as the director of the section for organizational development in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Oslo. In this position, he focused on how to align the resources used at various embassies with Norwegian interests in the corresponding country or organization. Before that, he was deputy director int eh same section. He spent five years working on World Trade Organization matters focusing on the agricultural and the National Agri-Marketing Association negotiations in the Doha Development Agenda. Trana is a career foreign-service officer who has served in Riyadh and Washington. He received his M.A. in economics from the University of Oslo.

Experience stories, songs and art in different languages. Fun for speakers of all languages, including English. World Stories Alive! is a collaborative project brought to you by Schlow Centre Region Library, The Center for Global Studies at Penn State, Bilingualism Matters at Penn State, and Global Connections.

Michael Allan is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and David M. and Nancy L. Petrone Faculty Scholar at the University of Oregon. He recently completed his first book In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton 2016), and is currently writing a book on the travels of the Lumière Brothers film company across North Africa and the Middle East. Beginning in February, he will be an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Forum for Transregional Studies in Berlin and connected to CNMS at Philipps University in Marburg.

Experience stories, songs and art in different languages. Fun for speakers of all languages, including English. World Stories Alive! is a collaborative project brought to you by Schlow Centre Region Library, The Center for Global Studies at Penn State, Bilingualism Matters at Penn State, and Global Connections.

Miguel Fraga, First Secretary at the Embassy of the Republic of Cuba in Washington, D.C. since the re-establishment of diplomatic relations on July 2015, will be visiting Penn State University Park campus to talk about the current state of US-Cuba relations.

Fraga was appointed First Secretary in June 2015 to the then Cuban Interests Section. Since 2006 he has worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in both the North American and U.S. divisions and the Office of the Minister. From 2008 to 2011 he served at the Cuban Embassy in Canada. Prior to working in Canada, from 2003 to 2008, Mr. Fraga was a member of the People's Power Provincial Assembly of the City of Havana which is the provincial parliament in Havana. Fraga graduated from the University of Havana Faculty of Law, following in 2005 with a Master of Science in Foreign Relations from the Higher Institute of Foreign Relations “Raúl Roa García.”

The talk is co-sponsored by the School of International Affairs, The Center for Global Studies, and Global Penn State. The event is free and open to the public.

Experience stories, songs and art in different languages. Fun for speakers of all languages, including English. World Stories Alive! is a collaborative project brought to you by Schlow Centre Region Library, The Center for Global Studies at Penn State, Bilingualism Matters at Penn State, and Global Connections.

Dr. Jayakar serves as co-director of the Institute for Information Policy, housed in the College of Communications. His areas of research cover telecommunications policy and media economics, with a special interest in universal access to telecommunications. He is a past head of the Media Management and Economics Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and currently serves on the boards of editors of The Information Society journal and the Journal of Information Policy. His research has been supported by grants from the Pacific Telecommunications Foundation, the Time Warner Cable Research Program on Digital Communications, the Media Democracy Fund, and AT&T.

In 2013, he received the Deans' Award for Excellence in Integrated Scholarship. He had previously received the 2004 Deans’ Award for Excellence in Integrated Scholarship and the 2002 Deans’ Award for Excellence in Teaching. Before joining academia, Dr. Jayakar was a research officer in India's Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, drafting research reports and position papers on media policy.

Experience stories, songs and art in different languages. Fun for speakers of all languages, including English. World Stories Alive! is a collaborative project brought to you by Schlow Centre Region Library, The Center for Global Studies at Penn State, Bilingualism Matters at Penn State, and Global Connections.

The rising and falling of walls has been a key motif in major literary works such as Kafka's The Great Wall of China (1917), Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), and Amos Kenan's dystopian novel, The Road to Ein Harod (1984). All three authors imagined the erecting of walls as the result of political instability, a deep collective fear, and the attempt to keep "barbarism" out. However, the three authors also worked during the heyday of modernism, and their imagined walls reflect foremost the failure to build a barrier, the inability to draw straight lines and united fronts, and the concentration of fear instead of its elimination.

Dr. Richard Alley, Evan Pugh Professor in the Penn State Department of Geosciences at the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, will speak about climate change as the first speaker of the Penn State School of International Affairs’ spring colloquium.

Alley has authored more than 170 refereed scientific publications about the relationships between Earth's cryosphere and global climate change. Alley testified about climate change before the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology in 2007 and 2010. His 2007 testimony was due to his role as a lead author of "Chapter 4: Observations: Changes in Snow, Ice and Frozen Ground" for the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has participated in the joint United Nations World Meteorological Organization panel since 1992, having been a contributing author to both the second and third IPCC assessment reports.

Nineteenth and twentieth-century coffeehouses in Cairo functioned as a hub for politicians, revolutionaries, intellectuals, writers, middle- and upper-class men and women, workers, immigrants, and people from different ethnic, racial, and religious communities. Friends and acquaintances met in the coffeehouse as part of their daily routine to talk about their private lives, but also public affairs. Intellectuals debated literature, philosophy, and society. Students discussed politics, and planned action. Indeed, coffeehouses were a social, political, and cultural institution in Egypt, one that bore the impact of sweeping processes of change occurring within Egyptian society, including Westernization, economic globalization, modernization, and reform.

Drawing on an array of archival sources, such as Egyptian secret police and informants' reports, or British Military Intelligence ones, this presentation will trace how Cairo's coffeehouses became a space for articulating public opinion, a process that culminated in them serving as a hub for revolutionary activity during the year-long series of anti-British strikes and mass demonstrations, known to Egyptians as the 1919 Revolution. Alon Tam will also show how certain coffeehouses became a meeting-place for the emerging middle class know as the effendiya, as part of a greater class hierarchy of coffeehouses, and how it used those coffeehouses for activism, as it became more engaged with the nascent nationalist and anti-colonial movement. Thus, he will argue that Cairo's coffeehouses had a pivotal role in the network of urban places, which gave birth to the effendiya.

Alon Tam is an expert on social and cultural history of the Middle East and North Africa. He is writing his PhD thesis at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, at the University of Pennsylvania, on Cairo's coffeehouses between the 1880s and the 1940s.

Experience stories, songs and art in different languages. Fun for speakers of all languages, including English. World Stories Alive! is a collaborative project brought to you by Schlow Centre Region Library, The Center for Global Studies at Penn State, Bilingualism Matters at Penn State, and Global Connections.

RF YEAGER is Professor of English at the University of West Florida. He is President of the International John Gower Society, editor of JGN The John Gower Newsletter, and has published widely on medieval English and European literatures. His special interests are Old English literature and language, the French of England, and the poetry of Chaucer and Gower. He has written and edited more than seventeen books and collections of essays, including Teaching Beowulf in the Twenty-first Century, with H.D. Chickering and Allen J. Frantzen, for MRTS; John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion; A Concordance to the French Poetry and Prose of John Gower; Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery, with Terry Jones, Terry Dolan, Alan Fletcher and Juliette Dor; edited and translated John Gower: The Minor Latin Works, and a companion volume, John Gower: The French Balades; and, with Brian W. Gastle, co-edited Approaches to Teaching John Gower’s Poetry, for the Modern Language Association and—with Ana Sáez- Hidalgo—John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, and Reception. With Alastair Minnis, he is series editor for the John Gower Society Monograph Series. His current research includes English recusant writings, especially in Spain, the scribes and limners of late fourteenth- century Norwich, and a literary biography of John Gower.

Dr. Piazza is Professor of Political Science. His research focuses on terrorism and political violence. Specific interests include: socioeconomic roots of terrorism; regime-type, human rights, repression and terrorism; state failure and terrorism; religion, ideology and terrorist organizations and behavior; ethnic minorities and terrorism; the global narcotics trade and terrorism; natural resources and conflict; right-wing extremism in the United States; public opinion and counterterrorism. His work has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Public Choice, Journal of Peace Research, Political Psychology, Conflict Management and Peace Science, Political Research Quarterly, Foreign Policy Analysis, International Interactions, Defence and Peace Economics, Southern Economic Journal, Security Studies, Terrorism and Political Violence and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism.

N. Katherine Hayles is the James B. Duke Professor of Literature at Duke University. She teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her books include How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, which won the Rene Wellek Award for the Best Book in Literary Theory, 1998-99, and Writing Machines, which won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Her work has been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, a Rockefeller Residential Fellowship at Bellagio, and a Presidential Research Fellowship at the University of California. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of Academia Europaea. Her most recent book, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious will be published from Chicago in March 2017.

In this presentation, I will focus on Francisco Goldman’s journalist pieces published during the 1980s and 1990s in the US. As I will explain, Goldman's heritage, life experiences, and travels have given him the unique opportunity to easily move back and forth between the Central American and United States (US) contexts. I will argue that this is a geographical and cultural movement that creates a "borderland" locus of enunciation. From this imagined borderland, Goldman mediates and translates between the histories, politics, and cultures of the US and Central American peoples. More specifically, since the 1980s, Goldman has functioned as a kind of "cultural translator" between the US and Central American readerships of alternative and mainstream media. By taking advantage of every possible outlet, Goldman has constantly documented and asked hard questions about local oligarchies in the region and the unequal relationship between the US and Central America, too. As I will demonstrate, the final effect of his interventions is the imagination of an emotional community of readers that can understand the complexity of Central America, its problematic political relation with the US, and the importance of the isthmus in understanding the idea of a continental continuity between the Hemispheric Americas (that is, América).

Judith Sierra-Rivera is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latina/o Studies at Penn State. She specializes in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx history of ideas and intellectual history. Her research and teaching interests analyze these areas through the analysis of social space, race, gender, sexuality, and affects. She is currently completing her first book-length project, Affective Intellectuals: Space of Catastrophe and Emotive Discourses in the Americas. This book studies what she calls the “affective locus of enunciation” in intellectual discourses. Considering crónicas, essays, autobiographies, radio performances, and blogs from Mexico, Chile, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central America, and the United States, this book defines a different kind of public intellectual by analyzing five authors (Carlos Monsiváis, Pedro Lemebel, Josean Ramos, Sandra Álvarez Ramírez, and Francisco Goldman) who address material and symbolic catastrophes in the post-1985 neoliberal state mode of production. Her analysis illustrates how these authors engage with everyday life and popular memories through a diversity of media. In so doing, their productions speak to an affective “we,” that is, a community sharing thoughts and feelings.

Peter Van Buren is a retired 24-year veteran of the U.S. Department of State. He spent a year in Iraq as a State Department Foreign Service Officer serving as Team Leader for two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). Now in Washington, he writes about Iraq and the Middle East at his blog, We Meant Well. His first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, was published in 2011, and his latest book, Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent, has just been published.

Experience stories, songs and art in different languages. Fun for speakers of all languages, including English. World Stories Alive! is a collaborative project brought to you by Schlow Centre Region Library, The Center for Global Studies at Penn State, Bilingualism Matters at Penn State, and Global Connections.

Dr. Ilieva will discuss characteristics of ancient and modern South Asia from the intellectual heritage of ancient South Asia as encoded in ancient texts such as the Rig Veda and the Natya Shastra to the impact of the modern Hindi boom in both the U.S. and India as evidenced by diaspora and local needs, professional needs, and Internet presence.

Dr. Ilieva is a Clinical Professor of South Asian Studies at New York University. She teaches Hindi language courses, as well as Ancient Indian Literature and Modern South Asian Literature courses. Her research focuses on the way language encodes certain socio-cultural meanings and, specifically, on the formulation of gender (self/)identity in Hindi and Sanskrit literature as a dynamic process through which Indian social contexts are actively constructed by applying the so-called ‘doing/performing gender’ approach. Dr. Ilieva’s studies are also informed by pragmatics in its employment of inductive methodology in a rigorously empirical approach and by critical discourse analysis, in an effort to examine discourse structures that reproduce or challenge relations of power and dominance in Indian society. In addition, she has examined Medieval Indian poetics, namely the schools of alankaara (ornaments) and dhvani (suggested meaning) in comparison with Ancient Greek and Roman Rhetoric and some contemporary European literary theories. In the field of foreign language pedagogy, most recently she has been involved in teacher education and training in project- and standards-based instruction, curriculum design and use of authentic materials. Dr. Ilieva has also been working on examining the differences in the oral performance of Hindi and Urdu heritage and foreign language learners with focus on differentiated pedagogical approaches to teaching.

Academy Award-winning director Michael Moore returns with what may be his most provocative and hilarious film yet: Moore tells the Pentagon to "stand down"--he will do the invading for America from now on.

Written, produced, and directed by Michael Moore, Where to Invade Next is an expansive, rib-tickling, and subversive comedy in which Moore, playing the role of "invader" visits a host of nations to learn how the U.S. could improve its own prospects. The creator of Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine is back with this hilarious and eye-opening call to arms. Turns out the solutions to America's most entrenched problems already exist in the world--they're just waiting to be co-opted.

Experience stories, songs and art in different languages. Fun for speakers of all languages, including English. World Stories Alive! is a collaborative project brought to you by Schlow Centre Region Library, The Center for Global Studies at Penn State, Bilingualism Matters at Penn State, and Global Connections.

This talk presents the academic literacies of a multilingual graduate student and how they are shaped by neoliberal pressures in the university. As neoliberalism consolidates itself as hegemonic ideology of the neoliberal university, academic socialization and research activities are ever more pressed towards creating compliant identities and dispositions in students and scholars. An analysis of a STEM graduate student’s literacies and motivations show that such academic practices do echo the dispositions and expectations pushed by neoliberal ideologies, but are not overdetermined by them. Rather that his motivations are layered, with ambiguous implications and strategic negotiations making up his academic literacies and disciplinary outcomes. Closely mapping such tensions in academic literacies, we believe, provides ways to make writers and scholars aware of possibilities within the neoliberal university and develop the dispositions needed to negotiate neoliberal expectations and assumptions for more ethical and empowering purposes.

Shakil Rabbi is a PhD-Candidate in the English Department. His research interests include academic literacies, multilingualism, and writing, the place of writing studies in the university, and the rhetoric of public intellectuals. He has taught classes in rhetoric and composition, writing in the social sciences, distant learning composition, English literature and education, and worked as an undergraduate writing tutor and graduate writing consultant at Penn State. He has also worked as a lecturer in English Literature and composition in Bangladesh, and as a primary school teacher in Thailand.

Dr. Mark Reese is Central Asian Subject Matter Expert with nineteen years of experience in region. Eight years regional field work in activities ranging from program management, academic research, to combat mission support. Current areas of research focus include social, political and cultural issues in present day Central and South Asia as well as translation of Uzbek literature into English.

Experience stories, songs and art in different languages. Fun for speakers of all languages, including English. World Stories Alive! is a collaborative project brought to you by Schlow Centre Region Library, The Center for Global Studies at Penn State, Bilingualism Matters at Penn State, and Global Connections.

This talk takes up the anti-nationalist politics of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov’s cinematic aesthetics in his 1988 film Ashik Kerib, The Strange Lover, a retelling of Mikhail Lermontov’s 19th century Russian orientalist tale of the same name. Paradjanov’s manipulation of the tableau-vivant troubles the distinction between flat and moving images, as well as two and three dimensional perspective. Engaging with a broader reading of Paradjanov’s films, which participate in a queer aesthetics and politics, I illustrate how The Strange Lover transforms the figure of the heroic lover into the beloved object of the viewer’s gaze. This inversion challenges Soviet Realist aesthetics and discourses of Soviet progress that rely upon a hetero-masculinist model of the Soviet subject. Paradjanov’s tableaux recuperate the flatness of the image by embracing the affective capacities of the beloved and the contemplative gaze of the viewer.

Leah Feldman is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. Her research explores the poetics and the politics of global literary networks, focusing on critical approaches to translation theory, semiotics, postcolonial theory, and Marxist aesthetics. Her current interests include contemporary formations of Eurasianist thought in new right media and communes, performance art, and alternative forms of socio-political collectivity. Her book project On the Threshold of Eurasia: Orientalism and Revolutionary Aesthetics in the Caucasus,1905-1929 exposes the ways in which the idea of a revolutionary Eurasia informed the interplay between orientalist and anti-colonial discourses in Russian and Azeri poetry and prose. Tracing translations and intertextual engagements across Russia, the Caucasus and western Europe, it offers an alternative vision of empire, modernity and anti-imperialism from the vantage point of cosmopolitan centers in the Russian empire and Soviet Union.

Dreams from the Concrete Mountain is an experimental documentary that takes viewers on an oneiric journey with Javier, a former guerrilla of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The action takes place within the payload of a truck that has been transformed into a giant camera obscura. The filmic mis-en-scene evokes a confessional, psychoanalytic space where Javier reflects upon his trajectory from a broken home in southern Colombia, into the guerrillas ranks, and back into the civilian sphere, which he calls "the mountain of concrete." The documentary is still in production and will be fodder for a programmatic article about surrealist visual anthropology. Come discuss this provocative work with director Alex Fattal, assistant professor of Film-Video and Media Studies.

Alex Fattal is a visual anthropologist, media studies scholar, and documentary artist whose work exists at the intersection of academia and the art world. His projects focus on the mediation of the Colombian armed conflict and have exhibited at the United Nations General Assembly Building, MOMA PS1, South Africa's Constitutional Court, among other spaces. He is professor of Film-Video and Media Studies at Penn State University, and holds a PhD in anthropology from Harvard University where he was an active member of the award winning Sensory Ethnography Lab. He publishes in scholarly journals as well as the popular press and has been interviewed or quoted in the Guardian, Washington Post, Economist, Los Angeles Times, and NPR's On the Media. He has two books forthcoming, Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency, Capitalism, and the Demobilization of FARC Rebels in Colombia (under contract with University of Chicago Press), and Shooting Cameras for Peace: Youth, Photography, and the Colombian Armed Conflict (Peabody Museum Press). Learn more about his work at: alexfattal.net and https://pennstate.academia.edu/AlexFattal.

Evans J.R. Revere will speak about current policy challenges in North Korea as part of the Penn State School of International Affairs' spring colloquium. Revere is senior director with the Albright Stonebridge Group, providing strategic advice to clients with a specific focus on Korea, China and Japan. Fluent in Chinese, Korean and Japanese, Revere retired from the Foreign Service in 2007 after a distinguished career as one of the U.S. Department of State's top Asia experts. He has extensive experience in negotiations with North Korea.

Lemon Tree, an Israeli drama, directed by Eran Riklis, tells the story of a Palestinian widow who must defend the lemon grove which has been tended to by her family for generations from her next door neighbor -- the new Israeli Defense Minister -- who threatens to have the grove torn down.

The film is an unflinching look at the security threats that anthropogenic climate change has already brought about and the risks it will multiply and accelerate if we do not take proper action. Security experts including Penn State’s own David Titley presents an "unnerving assessment," but one that "is by no means reason for fatalism – but instead a call to action to rethink how we use and produce energy." Additionally, Admiral Titley and other panelists will join me on the stage following the film for a discussion and a question and answer session.

Directed by Vishal Bhardwaj and co-written by Basharat Peer and Bhardwaj, Haider is a modern-day adaptation of William Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet. Protagonist Haider (played by Shahid Kapoor) returns to Kashmir after his father's disappearance to confront his uncle, the man he suspects of having played a role in his father's fate.

Retired U.S. ambassador and SIA advisory board member Karl Hofmann is President and Chief Executive Officer of Population Services International, a Washington-based global health organization. Mr. Hofmann is former U.S. Ambassador to Togo and Executive Secretary of the State Department. He also served on President Clinton's National Security Council staff.

Croatian playwright Radovan Ivsic wrote King Gordogan in 1943, and it was first performed in exile in Paris. It was an analysis of the totalitarian regimes of his day, and a prediction of those to come. This play has now been translated into contemporary English from the original Croatian for the first time and adapted for radio, by Carla Stockton.

This free public reading of the play King Gordogan, directed by the play's translator, will be recorded for the broadcast schedule of Trafika Europe Radio, Europe's first literary radio station. For more information, see trafikaeurope.org

On November 29, 2016 Colombia's Congress approved a historic peace accord between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC, an armed insurgency that has been fighting since the Colombian people narrowly rejected a plebiscite on an earlier draft. The media in Colombia, especially social media, played an instrumental role in the result of the plebiscite and the citizen mobilization that demanded the negotiations not fall apart in the wake of the No vote in the plebiscite. In this talk, Jose Antequera Guzman, leader of a youth movement in support of the Yes campaign and the citizen mobilization to salvage the peace accord, will reflect on the media's role in the tumultuous events of late 2016 in Colombia and how media activism can contribute to building a stable and lasting peace.

Jose Antequera Guzman is an award-winning lawyer, activist, and author whose work on human rights and historical memory in Colombia has been highly acclaimed. He is the son of Jose Antequera, a slain leader of the Patriotic Union party.

Dr. Yapa’s research combines theories of economic development, postmodern discourse theory, and Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Despite the massive efforts at economic development, statistical evidence shows a troubling persistence of poverty and increasing inequality of income (both within and between nations). Reminiscent of a Kuhnian "crisis in the paradigm", development economists (and their principal Marxist critics) are not able to offer us a satisfactory explanation of the failure of development.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o is a world renowned novelist and theorist of post-colonial literature, and Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and English at the University of California, Irvine. He has been short listed for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Ngugi wa Thiong'o has received honorary doctorates from abut a dozen universities around the world. He has held distinguished teaching positions at Yale and New York University, after his early education and teaching in Kenya. He is respected for being one of the earliest scholars to envision a more critical and inclusive relationship between English and local languages in English studies. His literary and linguistic vision has been crafted through the painful personal history of education in a British colony and academic life in an authoritarian postcolonial country.

This workshop will center on two topics of great interest to Chinese teachers: program development and curriculum design at the tertiary level. We will survey Chinese programs of different sizes regarding curriculum design, course offering and sequencing, and textbook selections. Using case studies, we will discuss ideas for student recruitment and successful practices in program building. We will conclude with an open discussion on meeting students' needs in becoming global citizens.

For more detailed information, please go to the CALPER Workshop Registration Site (http://sites.psu.edu/calperworkshops/)

Bridging Cultures offers American secondary school teachers the opportunity to establish relationships with international teachers that will stimulate partnerships and coordinated activities in their respective classrooms. Hosted on the University of Illinois campus in Urbana-Champaign, the program consists of an intense collaboration between participating American teachers and 20 visiting international secondary educators from the Global Institute for Secondary Educators, a U.S. Department of State program. Moving beyond the academic and theoretical approach of most teacher workshops, Bridging Cultures provides teachers with real-world comparative approaches.

The Bridging Cultures program is an initiative of the Illinois-Northwestern African Studies Consortium (http://www.northwestern.edu/african-studies/), with generous support from the Pennsylvania State University Center for Global Studies and University of Washington Center for West European Studies.

Online Application: To be considered for a space in this program you must complete an online application by May 1, 2017. Space is limited. An online application form is available at https://illinois.edu/fb/sec/1616445.

For questions, please contact Terri Gitler (tgitler@illinois.edu)

The Center for Global Studies

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